My Birthday - a holiday within our holiday

It was my birthday whilst we were in Luang Prabang we for a special treat we booked a fancy pants place in the mountains. It was amazing.

It was owned by an old French man and his not so old Lao wife. They were really nice, everyone there was lovely. And on Valentines day they gave us a free bottle of wine and some roses. We thought that it must be someone else's table so we tried to sit at an empty table, but it was for us. It was so cute of them.

The room was really lovely, it was the first actually pretty room we've had. The walls and the ceiling don't meet, there's a gap of a couple of feet between them, this makes the room wonderfully breezy at night. One night it rained and I was so excited!

This was our lovely room

The hotel was right on the river and there was a bamboo bridge which originally scared the shit out of me, but I trust it now and it is really fun. It bounces alot.

We took a kayak on the river. We were going to head downriver to where the people 'pick up rock'. Then we would stop and get picked up by the hotel. Simples.

Not simples, because we kept seeing a person picking up a rock or two. There were also lots of machines picking up many rocks on our way. We decided to keep going and follow our trusty map.

Here is our map:

You probably can't read it, but that's ok - neither could we.

We carried on the river in the raging sun. I was not such a good rower as it turned out. When Nic stopped rowing we just went left and right a lot and not actually along the river. It is a lot harder than it looks. Then Nic showed me how to steer, so I did that for a bit. Then he said that actually the person in the front doesn't steer. It went quite well after this.

The blazing sun.

 We kayaked past the pick up point and saw a wild elephant on the other side of the river. We decided that would be a good place to stop.

We called the guy from the hotel to come and get us and he said he would. We were a bit tired and hungry at this point and feeling very lost. And there was a wild elephant very close by and there were fires going on all over the place.

He didn't pick us up from there, we had to row up river to a farm with no sign. We attempted to talk to a local lady we found and ask her if we were on a farm, but she just laughed at us.

Eventually everything was fine and we met the hotel guys and went back to the hotel. We had some food and a swim in the pond and everything was awesome again.

The pond

We ended up staying here for 8 days (my birthday week and a bit) and it was really perfect. On the last night we moved into their most fancy villa which is about a mile away from anywhere and you have to walk over the bamboo bridge to get there.

Oh, also our waterproof camera does sort of work it's just the display that's broke, so Nic's happy about that. He now takes lots of selfies to check that it's still working...